Mr Robot CTF
“I never want to be right about my hacks, but people always find a way to disappoint”
This room is themed around the popular series on Netflix called Mr.Robot. The story follows a person named Elliot Alderson, a cybersecurity engineer and hacker with social anxiety disorder and clinical depression. Elliot is recruited by an insurrectionary anarchist known as "Mr. Robot", played by Christian Slater, to join a group of hacktivists called "fsociety”. The group aims to destroy all debt records by encrypting the financial data of E Corp, the largest conglomerate in the world.
This room has two tasks with Task 1 giving you instructions on how to connect to the VPN. This isn't important if you are using the attackbox or kali box that TryHackMe already provides us with, so we will skip this task.I will be using the attackbox provided. My approach to these write-ups will be more narrative and I will try to guide you through my process on things that I have tried in regards to what gave results and what didn’t. Enjoy!
Oh, hey! Didn’t notice you there. Looks like you stumbled upon me trying to hack into E Corp. There are three keys hidden in their servers that I am trying to find. You must hate E Corp as much as I do if you’re here. Let’s work together to get what we need. Okay we need to somehow enumerate and get information about their servers… How do we do that…? Think Alvin.. Think… Do you happen to know? Oh! Got it! I can use nmap to scan for any open ports and use that to my advantage! What were the commands again… Hmm… Oh! That’s right… nmap -v -sCV targetIP. What this will do is make it verbose so it will show the scanning process so we won't see a blank terminal, attempt to find version information, and run a default NSE script built into nmap.
Excellent! This output on the terminal gave me enough information to get started. Genius! Sometimes, I think I'm too smart for my own good, heheh. It looks like they have two ports opened, 22 and 80. That is SSH and HTTP. With SSH, we can remote in if needed but first let’s take a look at their apache webpage.
This is very nice… Looks like some of those commands play a video. Join prompts us to input an email in. Inform provides us a few slides with some stories… and question provides us more slides with a possible backstory… This is indeed interesting but it seems like we can’t really do much in the terminal we are given so lets take a look around with the website itself maybe see what directories there are with the source code.
Nothing too useful I suppose. Let’s use some tools now to see what we can find. Let’s try giving dirb a try. So, let’s go back to the terminal and get on dirb. Looks like dirb provided us with some interesting finds…
I see a readme page and a robots.txt file lets take a look at those to see what we find… Nothing from the readme page but this…
How about the robots pages?
BINGO! We found our first key and a dictionary file that we can use as well! I’d say we were making great progress and doing pretty well so far. Don’t you think?